John Reiser <jreiser(a)bitwagon.com> writes:
The IXP4xx networking engine operates big endian only. Nevertheless
many NSLU2 machines run little-endian and still use that networking
hardware.
With a performance penalty since all buffers have to be swapped.
Little-
endian operation of the CPU offers the advantage that an unaligned
fetch from memory gives results that are usable after quick fixup.
An unaligned fetch in big-endian mode essentially gives junk.
Both BE and LE obviously have advantages and disadvantages.
--
Krzysztof Halasa